POSSUM TRACKS: X-Files

Saturday, April 16, 2016

NIGHT WANDERINGS, SENIOR STYLE

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And now for more Possum Tracks stories:

Old folks wander in the night. We have a host of dark hours’ issues—bathroom visits caused by decrepit plumbing, early a.m. wakefulness, aches and pains which require a get-up-and-stretch or—perhaps—an analgesic and a cup of herbal tea. Snoring, wakefulness, illnesses and a whole host of things, a decade back, brought my husband and I to move into separate sleeping quarters, in an attempt to score the now mythical “good night’s sleep”. In our house, too, there are cats who multiply the night time Alarums and Excursions.

B0B is our tiger boy-from-the-hood /spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold. Old habits die hard, so he still keeps a paw in the local night-time goings on. As spring arrives, there are bunnies, voles, and mice on the move again, more especially their feckless young, which make easy prey. We wouldn’t know about that, of course, in our human cocoon, but B0B does. He’ll stand on my husband’s chest and meow if he wants to go out. 3 a.m. or 4, he really doesn’t care how you feel about this, especially if there is an enemy abroad, such as the young neighbor tom now leaving some sort of smart-ass gangsta tag on a nearby tree or trash can.

No! This Will Not Stand! As soon as it comes to his keen nose’s attention, B0B has to get out there to rectify the situation by adding his own p-mail counter message. If the other guy is still around, that can lead to a confrontation, resulting in Miau-geschrie as Mozart describes the sound, or Katzenmusik, as Google Translate does.

Another feature of nights in this house, I may be a grandma, but I confess I can still wake up screaming from a nightmare, a thing which exasperates everyone else who lives around here, from my husband to the cats. Some past life experience, or, maybe, some random programming from deep within the ancient brain stored at the top of my spine—a poor little shrew sort of critter, chased by a monstrous version of B0B—erupts into the classic night–terror.

OH NO... OH-NO-NO-NO!
IT SEES ME!

On these occasions, I scream. That either wakes me up, or brings my husband in to shout, "For God's Sake, woman!!" In that case, I’m the pain in the collective wanna-be-sleeping-ass.

The other night, however, I managed to wake myself up from a near-miss with one of these scream dreams. This particular one had been of the War of the Worlds variety, the kind where you are about to be sucked up onto a booming malevolence hovering overhead. Fortunately, on this occasion, before the mental crescendo of terror, I’d managed to come to by myself.

Still feeling jumpy, I eventually righted myself for a walk to the bathroom. Might as well do that, since I’m already awake. However, upon rounding a corner into a space nominally illuminated by a night-light, I encountered something I hadn’t expected, a moving silhouette, humanoid, the head round. The body was tall, very thin and the arms seemed to dangle in a loose and unmatched way, like something out of The Walking Dead.

I shrieked. It did too, so I hauled off and punched it in the chest as hard as I could. After all, the thing was bigger, but it didn’t appear all that steady on its feet.

Maybe, if I could knock it off balance, I could escape…

A thud and a warm breast bone crunched against my knuckles. The creature spoke.
“Ow!” and then “Hey! What the hell?”

As I said at the beginning of this, old folks wander in the night. As you might have expected, my husband and I had unexpectedly encountered one another in the half-dark, and both of us, still groggy, had had quite a scare. Hard on the heels of fear had come irritation, then embarrassment, at last resolving in the only possible way--with a laugh.

~~Juliet Waldron
All my historical novels:
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And while you're reading, hop on over to these other talented Books We Love Authors:

http://triciamg.blogspot.com/ (Tricia McGill)

http://mizging.blogspot.com/ (Ginger Simpson)

http://connievines.blogspot.com.au/ Connie Vines

Juliet Waldron

I am in the grandma zone, a long time writer and poet, posting at Crone Henge and BWL these days just because. Wish I could travel, and last year I was lucky enough to get back to the UK, specifically to Avebury to reconnect with the ancient temple. Hiking, camping, lover of solitude, cats, moons and gardens.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Elder Yard

We’re those annoying old folks in the neighborhood who don’t (and post-retirement no-longer-can afford even if they wanted to) yuppie “Arcadia” style* lawn care. (What else would you expect from a blogger who possum- identifies?)

Jes' passin' thru...

Husband and I bought this house 30+ years ago when we were in our late thirties and strong enough to do all the required maintenance. We cared for three long privet hedges, we mowed, and had the old, beat up silver maples—the reason we purchased the property in the first place—regularly thinned. We both worked, so paying for large tree maintenance was not a problem. We conscientiously fed the trees and hired trained arborists, not the butchers who engage in “topping” a.k.a. a really fast way to make a tree diseased, rotten, and highly likely to fall down in a wind storm.

Summer, 1985, one kid, and husband

2011, same tree, another angle, wider now

Over the years, I’ve planted 30 more trees on the property, which, considering that it’s barely an acre, was Arboreal Over-kill. The star of these early additions was an apple tree. The blooms delight us every spring. On a warm April evening it is possible to stand beneath it and hear the music of bees in the blossoms. For many autumns, this tree literally rained apples upon us. It still delights the eye and will always be honored for the mountains of sauce and pies it has provided.

Husband loathes yard work and curses every minute he spends doing it, so much fell on me and my bad back—although I’d expected all that and had still opted for this house. Our silver maples are “trash trees” which shed sticks and branches like crazy. I am forever picking up after them. Husband was forever driving to the recycle center with loads of dead wood and hedge clippings.

Years passed. Our health declined. There were trips to the hospital for big-deal surgeries. Much privet was removed. Yard maintenance has suffered.

We and the silver maples are all now in some disrepair, but we're still here, breathing for one another (carbon dioxide/oxygen cycle) and hoping for spring. They're sending up trial balloons as they shuck off those red bud casings.

Never mind that they cover my patio with their litter or that the pollen from their buoyant flowering makes all the mammals sneeze. We’re all quite pleased to witness another Vernal Equinox, another Purim, another Easter, another Hola Mahalla, another Holi, and any other spring celebration extant on our little blue planet. Welcome to the Growing Season!